Teachers unions have spent decades telling you they exist to serve children.
The head of the Chicago Teachers Union just said out loud what they actually believe.
What she told a packed room in Chicago – and what her union did the very next week – finally proves the point.
Chicago Public Schools Is Funding Student Protests Against Trump on May Day
The Chicago Teachers Union spent nearly $2.3 million in member dues to elect Brandon Johnson mayor of Chicago.
Johnson is a former CTU organizer who ran the city at the union's direction from the moment he took office.
On May 1 – a week from Friday – Chicago Public Schools has agreed to provide buses and bagged lunches so students at at least 100 schools can attend a 1 p.m. pro-union, anti-Trump rally at Union Park.
The CTU's own resolution authorizing the day describes the goal as standing up to "the authoritarian billionaire in Washington" and demanding ICE leave Chicago's cities.
Not one word about reading scores or math proficiency.
Chicago Students Can't Read But the Teachers Union Is Training Them to March Against ICE
Chicago Public Schools spends $28,702 per student each year.
For that money, the district produced a 2025 report card where only 40% of students read at grade level and just 26% can do math – and those numbers used the state's newly lowered benchmarks.
Under the old standards, fewer than one in three CPS students read at grade level and fewer than one in five could do math.
Among Chicago's 11th graders – a year away from voting age – only 40% read at grade level and only 25% are proficient in math.
Four in ten CPS students missed at least 10% of last school year.
That's the academic record the Chicago Teachers Union runs from every time it picks a fight with Trump.
CTU president Stacy Davis Gates called standardized testing "junk science rooted in white supremacy" when reporters pressed her on those numbers.
She wasn’t joking.
Davis Gates was re-elected CTU president anyway – then elected president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, now commanding more than 100,000 members statewide.
Only 18% of CTU's spending in fiscal year 2025 went toward actually representing its members.
The rest went to politics.
The Machine That Took Over Chicago City Hall and Is Coming for Your State Next
CTU's ruling caucus formed in 2008 as a reading group for Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine – a book about using manufactured crises to seize political power.
It swept the 2010 CTU officer elections and never let go.
The caucus funneled nearly $2 million in teacher dues to the CTU PAC while the union's own handbook promises dues will not be used for political purposes.
Members filed an unfair labor practice complaint.
Nobody in Chicago's power structure cared.
CTU and its affiliates pumped nearly $6.5 million into Johnson's 2023 mayoral race – the single biggest spending force in the election.
The payoff was complete control of City Hall.
The union then spent $2.8 million on the 2024 school board races.
Davis Gates, now leading the statewide Illinois Federation of Teachers, has confirmed she plans to bring CTU's model to every school district in Illinois.
At a City Club of Chicago event last June, Davis Gates got ahead of the critics who say the union thinks it owns children.
She didn't deny it.
"CTU thinks your children are its children," she told the crowd, raising the objection herself. "Yes, we do. We do. We do."
She was laughing when she said it.
That's the woman running Chicago's schools – and soon, every school in Illinois.
Sources:
- Lindsay Kornick, "Chicago Public Schools declare May 1 a 'day of civil action' for students," Fox News, April 20, 2026.
- "Resolution for May 1 Day of Civic Action and Defense of Public Education," Chicago Teachers Union, March 12, 2026.
- Mila Koumpilova, "Chicago Public Schools and its teachers union reach May Day agreement," Chalkbeat, April 17, 2026.
- "Just 2-in-5 Chicago students read at grade level under lowered proficiency standards," Illinois Policy Institute, October 30, 2025.
- "How Stacy Davis Gates made the Chicago Teachers Union toxic," The Last Ward, April 27, 2025.
- "What to expect with 3 more years of Stacy Davis Gates leading Chicago Teachers Union," Illinois Policy Institute, May 19, 2025.
- "Teachers Union Head Gleefully Declares That Her Union Owns American Children," Daily Caller, June 24, 2025.
